


Boulevard of Broken Dreams

by katrinawritesthings



Category: SHINee
Genre: Brotp, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-10-05
Packaged: 2018-10-20 20:03:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katrinawritesthings/pseuds/katrinawritesthings
Summary: an apocalypse fic inspired surprisingly not by the song but bywalk me back throughwhich is a better apocalypse fic that u should read like rn“I walk alone, I walk alone….” Jonghyun hums along with his air guitar notes.tumblr





	Boulevard of Broken Dreams

“I walk a lonely road… the only survivor that I have ever known. Don’t know where it goes, but it’s….” Jonghyun looks around him as he walks, at the cracked pavement, the rusted, overgrown cars, the smashed windows and fallen buildings, the faintest glimmers of sunset that shine through the haze of permanent smog that’s covered the world. “But it’s home to me and I walk alone,” he sings, hearing the music clearly in his head like it wasn’t already eleven years old by the first year of the apocalypse. His feet follow the chipped white lines in the center of the street, stepping exactly in the center of each one and the center of each space between them, one OCD thing that developed to take place of other compulsions that the cracking of the Earth made impossible to keep. **  
**

“I walk this empty street, on the Boulevard of--” he squints at the faded letters on the nearest street sign. “Ish… Iths… Ithshilth… Cherry Dreams.” He skips over this street sign in favor of the second nearest one that he can actually pronounce. “Where the city’s dead and I’m the only one and I walk alone.”

He lifts his hands in an air guitar, remembering when he had callouses from practises and not from surviving. He plucks imaginary strings with his fingers like he used to because he was always too stuck up to use actual guitar picks. He thinks his spiked brass knuckles are making his form a little off, but whatever. His imaginary guitar doesn’t mind.

“I walk alone, I walk alone….” He hums along with his air guitar notes. If he squints harder at the dim horizon, he can almost positively tell that the sun is about to set. He should find somewhere to spend the night soon, before it gets cold and darker. Maybe if he’s lucky, he’ll find somewhere with a tiny, tiny ray of sunshine to wake up to in the morning, but he won’t hope. He’s lucky enough to be able to see the haze glowing faintly with the light. He used to think that there was somewhere on this fraction of the planet where he could enjoy the sun one more time, but he gave up on that a few years ago. “I walk alone, I walk a--”

_“My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me!”_ He kicks his performance up several notches for the chorus, belting the lyrics at the top of his voice. Why the fuck not? He half hops from line to line now, taking larger steps as he jams out. _“My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating! Sometimes I_ … wish someone out there would find me.” Wow. That was kind of a buzzkill. He stops for a second to frown as old memories of friends try to invade his mind again. This isn’t helpful at all. He thinks instead about the last human he encountered. The asshole that tried to shank him for his cute puppy blanket.

Fuck that guy.

“Till then, I walk alone,” he sighs. He puts his air guitar down and stuffs his hands into his pockets instead. That guy was over a year ago anyway, he thinks. Whatever. No big deal. He pet a stray cat just yesterday and that was much better than any human interaction he could ever be faced with. “Hmm-hmm… hmm-hmm… hmm-hmm… hmmmm-hmm,” he hums, looking up when a hot breeze soars through the sky. Then, as he starts the second set of hums, another voice joins his.

“I’m walking down the-- _whoa_ \--” Jonghyun doesn’t even see the new human’s face before his fist is jabbing right over it. He jumps back and looks down at where they ducked away, fists raised, muscles flexed, heart pounding, poised to defend himself immediately. “Hey, hey,” the person says, stepping back as well, raising their hands innocently. They’re smiling; plush lips curve up easily under a black fringe and slightly hooked nose. “Nice reflexes,” they say, nodding at Jonghyun’s hands. Jonghyun stares at them. Lazy, slouched, confident, a crossbow safe over their shoulder. Not threatening. At least not right now. He lowers his fists slowly, but keeps his distance.

“You too,” he says. He almost stabbed them in the fucking face with his fist. They keep both their hands and their smile up as they give Jonghyun a little shrug. Looking them up and down, Jonghyun feels his heart settling down and the rest of his chest twisting in apprehension in its place. Threatening or not, Jonghyun has no info on this person other than that they don’t look nearly as troubled as they should be to be meeting a stranger in a world where strangers are few and far between and usually hostile.

“I’m Taemin,” this stranger tells Jonghyun, slowly offering one of their hands forward. A rosary bracelet dangles off of their wrist. “Good song choice. Did you used to be scene or something?”

“Um…,” Jonghyun says. He eyes up Taemin’s hand for a moment, eyes up the rest of them for any places for blades to be hidden, and then takes it with his hand. Taemin shakes three and a half times; Jonghyun tightens his grip and keeps them there for six and a half more to make it ten before he spends the next three weeks clenching and unclenching his fingers. If Taemin thought that was weird, they keep it to themselves, for which Jonghyun is grateful. “No,” he says. “I just really liked the song.”

“Hmm. Cool. I used to be scene as fuck,” Taemin says conversationally. They stuff one of their hands into their jacket pockets, which makes Jonghyun take another step back. Who knows what he has in there. “I had the coon stripe hair and lip piercings and everything. I don’t really mind losing my dye and clothes and shit, but I really wish I hadn’t thrown out my clip-on piercings before I lost my real ones and the holes closed up. I miss them sometimes.” They smile blandly at Jonghyun, rocking on their toes as they wait for Jonghyun to reply like this isn’t fucking weird. Jonghyun feels up his own pocket to make sure that his switchblade is still in there, just in case.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Taemin, I told you,” Taemin says, holding their arms out to put themselves on display. “Survivor, dancer, sniper, punner, gardener, dick sucker, whatever.” They shrug pleasantly and put their arms back down. Jonghyun stares at them more. That was an… interesting set of descriptors.

“Gardener?” he asks, tilting his head in confusion. Gardener of _what_? Jonghyun remembers plants, yeah, but the lack of sun and atrocious conditions for life make that profession seem a little outdated.

“Ahh, it’s mostly weeds,” Taemin admits, pinching the bridge of their nose in embarrassment. “But sometimes Eve gets some tiny little tangerines on her branches and we share them all.” Eve. Taemin’s tangerine tree is named Eve. He can’t imagine why; even taking the rosary on their wrist in consideration, Jonghyun is pretty sure that Eve ate an apple, not a small orange. He frowns, trying to think of why Taemin would name a tree, and then why they would name a tree after the wrong person, and then he blinks rapidly and shakes his head out of his thoughts.

“Wait--‘we’?” he asks. “Who’s ‘we?” There are no more ‘we’s in this world anymore.

“My friends,” Taemin says brightly. “Whose dicks do you think I suck? We stay in this nice little apartment building down this street.” They point over their shoulder with their thumb. Jonghyun leans a little to the left to squint down the street. He doesn’t believe it. He’s astounded that he’s met just one person; no fucking way are they telling him that there are more nearby. “C’mon,” Taemin says. They take a few slow steps back. “I’ll take you there. You need a place to sleep tonight, right?”

Right, but Jonghyun doesn’t exactly want that place to be somewhere some random unsettling stranger leads him to. He doesn’t know who Taemin’s “friends” are, or even if they’re there at all. Maybe Taemin is a fucking cannibal or something and they’re just lying to him to lure him into their death trap. Jonghyun would rather not walk into that. He’s better off continuing on his own.

But then, Taemin has their crossbow. They could let Jonghyun walk off and then shoot him in the back. Or if Jonghyun finds a place to hide for the night, they definitely know the area better than him and could find him easily. If Jonghyun goes with them, they’ll at least be in punching distance, and he does have a gun and a few bullets left that he’s been saving in his bag.

“Come on,” Taemin says again, gentler this time. “If I wanted to kill you I wouldn’t’ve talked to you in the first place.” They shrug their shoulders up and down once. “Food and rest and friendly faces. I bet soon enough you’ll be back to your air guitar shredding normal self and everything.” They turn their back on him and walk down the street, obviously confident that Jonghyun will follow. Jonghyun stays in his spot for a few more long moments. Then he pulls his knife out of his pocket and follows. When Tae notices his footsteps, they glance over their shoulder again with a smile.

“You know, your voice was pretty nice,” they say. “Jinki’s been dying for someone to sing with again. He’s really going to like you.” They stop in front of a tall fence with a padlock, pull out a key from their pocket, jam it in the lock, and hold the gate open for Jonghyun to pass through. Jonghyun does, very cautiously, and slips more into the corner so Taemin isn’t too close as they shut the gate and lock it again. Watching them click the lock into place unsettles him greatly, but Taemin just jerks their head to get him to follow again. Jonghyun waits a few moments again before he takes his first step.

Before he’s taken two, Taemin stops suddenly and turns around. Jonghyun raises his knife on reflex and Taemin stops short, lifting their hands in surrender again with an amused little smile. If it were years before Jonghyun would probably feel guilty for being so defensive.

“Wait here for a minute,” Taemin says. “Minho takes a while to warm up to people and Kibum is less trusting than you are.”

“But Jinki will want to sing with me,” Jonghyun says. To be honest, all three of these people could just be plants, for all he knows. Why not just play along? Taemin’s smile turns wider and they nod before they turn around again and stroll down the street and into a building.

Jonghyun feels up the fence behind him to gauge how easy it would be to climb in a hurry. He also struggles to remember what the words were to his favorite duet.


End file.
